Playful had a chat with Sam and Pascal AKA CYRK, who were about to play their longest set together, closing Panorama Bar Monday morning.
What’s up, how’s 2023 been treating you?
We are good. 2023 hasn’t been too bad for us, we spent countless hours in our brand new studio preparing releases for 2024, we had full releases on Polari, Folklor Nation and Cultivated Electronics, we played really cool deejay and live shows including P-Bar and the Arte Concert-Tegel stream, we also joined a new agency, we can not complain.
Who takes what role, when working together as a duo?
We are a duo on stage but first of all a couple since more than 10 years, so we know each other really well.
Sam from Belgium, Pascal from Germany, living in Berlin for more than a decade.
In the studio there is no particular role except Pascal does all mixes and Sam more of the arrangements, when it comes to ideas, it is really 50/50.
We try to keep a balance but without any pressure.
If you could mention only three cities or places in the world, where you’ve collected most of your inspiration, which places would that be?
First of all Berlin has a huge influence on us as we have a lot of awesome friends here, we can see a lot of art, listen to a lot of great music… Detroit for its
Influence on music as we are big fans of Detroit techno, house and electro, We´ve been there a lot of times and have also a lot of friends over there.
We would say last Bangkok which is one of our favorite cities in the world, we try to go once a year and we also take some time off in Thailand (Koh Lanta), so it
Is a very good source for resourcing and finding new ideas.
How is the dynamic and communications between you during your sets?
When we play live, we don’t really need to communicate too much: Pascal does all synths, Sam all drums and as we play our own music, we kind of have those automatic
habits on how to arrange on the fly, how to make changes, breaks… when we deejay it is a different story and usually Pascal is the main pilot as deejay was his first love and he very often has a better view of what to do (and someone needs to take the lead)
What’s your relationship with Panorama Bar?
We love that place, it is pretty much the only club we visit as guests, we ´ve been regulars since it opened (when there was no Berghain yet) and a lot of the music we produce is influenced by what happens up there. We very often produce music influenced by a set we heard. We sometimes joke when we finish a track that it is perfect for PBar on a Sunday afternoon, or at 6 in the morning.
As far as playing, it is our first time deejaying as CYRK (we played live before) and we also both played a few solo sets (Pascal closed PBar in the past)
How do you prepare a closing set together?
We started by each collecting a lot of music, put everything in a big pot, then decide how we arrange them into playlists. We then practiced to see if
Any track was really not working, in that case we deleted it. We then went back and tried the playlists a bit more while re-arranging them.With of course a lot of practice
In between.
What’s the longest set you’ve ever played together?
We never played more than 5-6 hours together, but we live together and make music together, so maybe it counts lol.
Lately we had a long set at Folklor in Lausanne and it was a lot of fun. This might be our longest set together.
What can we look forward to Sunday evening/Monday morning?
We will serve a mix of house, new and old, electro, Italo (dark, ebm, happy), some Detroit, some Chicago, some vocals (not too much)… we will try to keep it interesting and entertaining.